Sebastian | Oliver (trickarrow) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-02 11:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | black widow, hawkeye |
Who: Callum and Shailee
What: Callum being an irritating SOB
Where: Callum's motel room
When: Immediately following this
Warnings/Rating: Cursing. Shoe throwing.
Once she managed to hail a cab, it took Shailee just under fifteen minutes to get to the rundown motel where Westerberg was staying. She stumbled out of the cab after handing the cabbie a bill, four inch heels clutched in one hand, the door of the vehicle the other. Dressed as she was in a midriff-baring top and shorts that barely qualified as being longer than the ‘booty’ variety, barely able to stand straight at 3 in the morning, Shailee knew she must look like a class act. But this wasn’t her fault. It was her night off. She was supposed to be taking an anonymous stranger home to help her forget the stress of the last week. Instead, she was working when she was in no state to, forced to check in on a man she could barely stand. Why the fuck had she thought accepting this handler assignment would be a good idea again?
She stood outside the motel waiting for a few minutes after the cab pulled away, debating what she should do. There was no point wandering around the motel looking for his door, as there was no way she was going to remember his room number even if she were looking straight at instead. Alright then, plan B. “Westerberg!” She hollered at the top of her voice, loud enough to be carried straight across the parking lot. “I’m here. Now get your ass out here.”
He hadn’t really expected her to come, but apparently his handler, when drunk, couldn’t tell when he was lying through his teeth. A useful bit of information to file away to use later, that was for sure, and when he heard her yelling outside the motel, a smile cracked his lips and he got up from the hard bed. A peek through the curtains saw her standing out there in a little less than he had been imagining, and while he wasn’t going to complain, he certainly knew enough not to comment. The chain was thrown and the door pulled open, a second floor room that opened onto the outdoor walk that ran the perimeter of the motel. “If you keep screaming like that, you’re going to wake everyone within five miles,” he chided her, coming to lean over the railing towards her, cigarette in hand, and clearly, not bleeding.
She might not have been able to stand too well, but when she saw him standing there, leaning over the railing as though he hadn’t just dragged her ass over here in the middle of the night for nothing, something within Shailee just snapped. Running barefoot across the parking lot (it was easier to keep her balance when she was moving, for some reason), she took the stairs to the second floor at top speed, somehow managing to both trip up the stairs (that was going to leave a bruise, if not more), and keep moving without losing her grip on her shoes. Once Callum was in view once again, she grabbed a shoe by the heel and hurled it at him, not caring whether the stiletto hit him right in the eye. In fact, she wished it did.
“You little shit. Why the fuck did you make me come here?” Her volume had gone down a tad, but not nearly enough to qualify as conversational. “I told you you had better be fucking bleeding.” Shailee didn’t know how she was going to make him pay (or even how she had just managed to run up stairs; maybe it’d be better if she stood against the railing, you know, just in case), but pay he would. How literal was the CIA about that whole ‘don’t kill the asset’ rule anyway?
His reflexes were honed enough that dodging the thrown stiletto gave him little trouble, or maybe that was just her bad aim with all the tequila she had supposedly had. No matter what, Callum crouched to pick up the shoe, holding it out to her by the strap, his brows raised. “Drop something?” he asked, nonplussed by her tone or the sharp words she threw at him like darts. This was quite the change from the controlled professional who had picked him up from the airport, or even the young woman from the years prior when everything had happened in Prague. Three versions of the same women, and Callum still wasn’t entirely sure what to make of her.
“I wasn’t lying to you. I am bleeding.” He thrust his other hand forward, displaying the most miniscule paper cut possible, a slit in the pad of his middle finger, reddened. “You didn’t say how bad it had to be, ma’am.” His smile tugged at the side of his mouth, giving her a long look as though to challenge her.
Shailee covered the rest of the distance between them in a few quick steps, never straying far from the railing (the floor wasn’t exactly stable). “Give me that,” she hissed, snatching her shoe back from his hand. She squinted at his hand for a second, almost missing the barely-visible cut. “You asshole.” Without thinking, Shailee shoved Callum, hard with her free hand. “What the hell is your problem?” She didn’t know why exactly she was so angry at him for playing a stupid fucking joke on her; all she wanted right now more than anything was to hit him. Instead, she grabbed the cigarette that was still in his hand and crushed it in her fist (that was going to hurt later, along with her shin), before dropping the crumpled paper to the ground. “What do you want?”
Callum relinquished the shoe without a bit of a fight, though the shove took him by surprise, two steps stumbled back before he caught himself with a hand on the railing, eyes widened for a brief moment. “I don’t have a problem,” he snapped out as he regained his footing, stepping towards her, unafraid of his handler. “And I was fucking bored. So I called you to give you some shit. So just chill. It was just a fucking joke.” Bending down, Callum paid her no mind as he picked up the crumpled cigarette, lips pursing before he labeled it as a loss and pulled a fresh one out of the pack tucked in his shirt pocket. Lighting up, he gave her a long look with a lungful of smoke released. “You need to relax.”
Shailee resisted the urge to swat the new cigarette out of his mouth, focusing instead of what exactly it was she wanted to say. “Get something straight, Westerberg. My job is to make sure you do what you’re told, and that you stay alive. I’m not here to fucking entertain you. The next time you find yourself bored in the middle of the night?” She paused, losing her train of thought momentarily. What was she saying again? Oh, right. “Do what a normal guy does and order some fucking porn.” Shailee took a step backwards and stumbled over her own heel, catching herself against the railing before she could actually fall. She would not let him watch her fall (again), not after all this.
If he took any offense to what she was saying, it didn’t register on his face as he instead took a long drag from his cigarette, blowing the smoke up towards the heavens above their head. “Gonna guess that everyone in this dump think my entertainment was ordered from the yellow pages tonight,” he stated, a stab at the spectacle she had made with her entrance, and all the skin that she showed. Turning on his heel, Callum started to move back towards his room, flicking the remainder of the cigarette over the railing. “Go home, Shailee. You’re drunk and going to kill yourself. And I’m not going to be blamed for that.”
“You know what, Westerberg? Fuck you, and your judgments.” She pushed off the railing and followed him towards his door (this conversation wasn’t over until she said it was), only bouncing once against the doorframe. “Tonight was my night off. I get one of these every few weeks and if I’m really fucking lucky, it lands on a weekend. So yeah, I’m drunk. But I have every right to drink however the fuck much I want to and dress however the hell I feel like so fuck you.” Shailee was so angry now that she was practically spitting; the only thing keeping her from bodily tackling Callum right now was the small voice in the back of her head telling her she was being unreasonable and needed to walk away. Well, fuck that voice too.
Callum didn’t think she’d come after him, so when he heard her voice following after him, he turned, frame in the doorway of his room, forearms pressed against the doorframe, giving her a long look. There was a lot he could say to what she was ranting about, and honestly, he didn’t give a shit what she did, who she did, or how she dressed. But apologies weren’t coming that night, not from him, so instead he held his hands up in a show of defeat. “If tonight’s your night off, then leave. Sorry for fucking pissing on your tequila parade,” Callum bit back at her, taking a step back and grabbing hold of the door, pulling it closed. “Next time? Don’t answer the fucking phone if it’s your precious night off. Hmm?”
If Callum was trying to apologize, he was doing a piss-poor job of it. Shailee caught the closing door with her hand, using a surprising amount of force to keep it open. “What the fuck about ‘I’m your handler’ is so hard for you to fucking understand? I can’t just not answer my phone when you call, because in case you forgot, there are plenty of people who’re going to be pissed off about your little deal if they hear about it. So the next time I ask you if you’re actually hurt, do me a fucking favor and just tell me the goddamn truth.” Releasing her grip on the wooden door, Shailee moved away, her piece said. All of the yelling was starting to give her a headache.
He was tempted just to let her leave, to slam the door in her face and retreat within his room, but something about what she had to say stopped him. Callum threw the door open wide once more and stepped out, reaching out to grab her by the arm. “Wait-” he started, though as soon as the word was said, he had no idea what to follow it up with. There was a lot of defiance wrapped up in him on the heels of being caught, of being cornered into this decision, but that didn’t mean a lick of it was her fault. She wasn’t even in the group that had caught him.
The unexpected hand on her arm caught Shailee off guard, and she stumbled once again, this time towards Callum. “Christ,” she muttered, putting a hand against the doorframe to catch herself. The loss of balance seemed to have cut through the anger, because there was no harshness in her voice when replied to him. “What?”
As soon as she turned towards him, Callum removed his hand from her arm, pushing it back through his hair as his gaze found the ground, quiet for a long while before he gave a shake of his head. “I won’t do it again,” he muttered by way of apology, and it was as close as he would ever get to admitting that he had fucked up. “That’s all. You can go.” His hand pushed back through his hair and he took a step backwards into the room, though he didn’t move to close the door this time, glancing up at her, a heavy gaze, wary.
Whatever Shailee had been expecting, the apology (if it actually qualified as one) had been it. She stood there stumped for a moment, her mind completely blank of all responses. “Good. Thanks.” She moved towards the railing that overlooked the parking lot, each step slower and more deliberate than she needed it to be. Once her hand was securely wrapped around the iron bar, she turned back to look at the man in the door. “Monday,” she said, by way of farewell, suddenly too tired to keep talking. She slipped down the stairs and back into the parking lot, where she would have to call yet another cab to take her home.
It was going to be a long time before she’d be able to climb into bed. And she was going to have a hell of a hangover in the morning.